You Are Not a Content Machine
Content Creator. Content Strategist. Content Marketer. “9 Tips to Becoming the Best Content Creator in Your Industry.” So-and-So’s Content is So Hot Right Now.
Your work has been referred to as “content” at some point in the last five years. You have possibly called it that yourself — I have called my own work that. I’ve worked as a content creator, content strategist, content manager — this is at its essence the same thing as being a paperweight creator, paperweight strategist and paperweight manager.
Does it matter if employers, your audience or you yourself refer to your work as “content” over “art,” “work,” or just what it is — i.e. music, video, painting, poetry?
Yes. Yes, it matters a lot.
Spotify CEO, failed musician, billionaire and ping-pong afficionado Daniel Ek said in a July 30 interview with Music Ally that, for recording artists to succeed on his platform they have to understand “it is about putting the work in,” adding, “you can’t record music once every three to four years and think that’s going to be enough.”
He went on to use Taylor Swift’s Folklore as an example of how an artist can successfully draw attention to a release — though he didn’t contextualize the influence of her status, infrastructure and more than 50 million records sold previous to this release.
Ek is merely the latest of a centuries-old rogue’s gallery of non-artist businessfolk who proclaim from their bully pulpits how artists should create their work and what their work should be like — essentially in order to sell more of said work and fatten their own accounts.
This is the same man who said in a 2019 interview, “We believe our market that we’re going after is audio, and that’s going to be at least a billion, probably two or three billion people around the world that [will] want to consume some form of content like that on a daily or weekly basis. And if we’re going to win that market, I think we have to [own] at least a third of that market.”
This will not be a rant on the music industry, nor will it be an attack on Spotify. In fact, I argue against boycotting it. The simple matter is that they need to pay artists more than $0.00318 per stream.
Instead, this is the argument for why your art is not “content.” And I’m speaking to artists of all disciplines, because we’re all in the same predicament.
What’s the Big Deal?
Why do I care so much about what we call it? What’s wrong with “content?”
The word itself has many meanings, but the definition that applies to its current use regarding material that is written, photographed, designed, recorded, etc, descends from its use to describe the words and pictures that populate a website.
It means at its core … filling. Stuffing. The stuff that fills a container. And this container? It’s built and controlled by someone else. And its profits go in large part to someone else. The term is reductive by nature.
This is the language of business, and it equates your work with packing peanuts.
When we refer to our writing, our visual, physical or audio art as “content,” we minimize it. What we make is the result of work, just as a delicately crafted watch, a piano or a cabinet is the result of work. Just as a stone wall, a garden or a house is the result of work. I dare you to refer to a Michelin chef’s work as “content.” And you’re literally consuming that.
Content is a word very specifically crafted to equate your work with consumption. It is deliberately used to frame your work as a commodity.
In 2014, writer Ursula K Le Guin said,
“Right now we need writers who know the difference between the production [of] a market commodity and the practice of an art … Developing written material to suit sales strategies in order to maximize corporate profit and advertising is not quite the same thing as responsible book publishing or authorship … Letting commodity profiteers sell us like deodorant and tell us what to publish and what to write … the profit motive is often in conflict with the aims of art.”
Neither Le Guin nor I mean to suggest that artists can’t or shouldn’t be paid for their work or that it’s beneath an artist to hope to make a buck. We all hope to make a living from our work. And for any of us to make a living at it, we require other people who in some way also will make a living from it.
However, we control the means of production. This means we have the power to dictate what that work consists of and, to some degree, how it is seen.
The power is in our hands, and so is the responsibility.
Escaping the Content Mentality
How we talk about ourselves influences how we think about ourselves. How we talk about our work influences how we think about our work.
We cannot escape the machine that flattens our work into a commodity. Boycotting Spotify, Apple Music, Netflix, etc. is impractical and only hurts artists more (although we should all lessen our dependence upon Amazon, but that’s for another time).
Playwright Bertolt Brecht wrote:
“Anybody who advises us not to make use of such new apparatus just confirms the apparatus’s right to do bad work; he forgets himself out of sheer open-mindedness, for he is thus proclaiming his willingness to have nothing but dirt produced for him … the old forms of communication are not unaffected by the development of new ones, nor do they survive alongside them.”
Brecht wrote that in 1930. He was talking about film.
What was he saying? Yes, it’s hard to deal with this new form, but it’s not going anywhere, and disengaging from it only makes it easier for it to produce bad work.
What do we do instead? We work within the system in order to change it.
Daniel Ek isn’t going to read this article, jump up from his desk and shout “I must pay artists more!” However, you may read this article and decide to purchase music directly from your favorite independent artist. You may read this article and decide to start a dialogue with your audience about the difference between “content” and “art.”
We may not be able to escape the machine, but we can work within it.
In that same 2014 speech, Ursula K Le Guin said:
“We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable, [but] so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art …the name of our beautiful reward is not profit, it is freedom.”
Change begins with how we talk about our work. How we see it. And then with how we talk with our audience about our work.
Change begins with how your audience values your work. Do they see it as an item for consumption? Or do they see it as a channel for human connection, the result of work and care, work worthy of remuneration?
Change begins with artists supporting one another. Valuing one anothers’ work. Lowering the volume on competition and jealousy (which also play into commodification and capitalism) and instead shouting one anothers’ praise from the rooftops.
We escape the content machine by escaping the content mentality. If we and our audiences at the smallest scale transform how we see and value our work, this can be a model for larger-scale change.
An Attack to One Art Form Is an Attack to All
Though we began this piece with Spotify, the devaluation of crafted work to “content” is by no means limited to the music industry.
The commodification of contemporary art is a particularly nasty strain of this and, if you can imagine, even more parasitic than the old music industry.
Writers, illustrators, photographers and filmmakers are particularly susceptible to the content trap — after all, our work is the chuck steak for the internet meat grinder.
Since the onset of COVID-19, theatre and dance have largely gone digital, increasing the demand for … content.
In that same piece from 1930, Brecht wrote, “… the whole of art without any exception is placed in this new situation; it is as a whole, not split into parts, that it has to cope with it; it is as a whole that it turns into goods or not.”
We’re in this together.
Again, I beat the drum of interdisciplinary collaboration. Again, I call for empathy.
Let us rethink how we engage with other forms of art. Do we view film, music and photography as consumables or the product of work? Do we as artists take the easy, cheap or free way out when we want to engage with another discipline? If I as a writer don’t support filmmakers, if I as a musician don’t support painters, if I as a theatre artist don’t support musicians, then I am relegating all work to the dustbin of content.
In a 2002 conversation with Elizabeth Gilbert for GQ, songwriter, actor (and my patronus) Tom Waits described a good day of recording as:
“…when my knees are all skinned up and my pants are wet and my hair’s off to one side and I feel like I’ve been in the foxhole all day. I don’t think comfort is good for music. It’s good to come out with skinned knuckles after wrestling with something you can’t see. I like it when you come home at the end of the day from recording and someone says, ‘What happened to your hand?’ And you don’t even know … That’s a good day of work.”
I don’t think he’d be content with “content.”
